Categories
Philosophy

Climate Change and the Logic of the Whole

Climate change is not a problem inside a stable planetary system. This text indicates how it is reorganising the relations through which planetary stability itself is reproduced.

Categories
Philosophy

Fascism as Consequence: How Communication Systems (can) Drift Toward Dictatorship

Fascism does not begin with a dictator. It takes shape through recurrent patterns of threat, identity and authority, until a leader can occupy the position those patterns have made available.

Categories
cybernetics

Failed Aptitude: Why Power Keeps Selecting the Wrong People

The scale of the consequences has changed while the competitive selection tests for authority remain embarrassingly small.

Categories
cybernetics

The Song Remembers: Music, Language and Harmonic Structure

We do not simply hear songs, speech and culture. Their repetition teaches us how to hear what comes next, while every new encounter quietly changes the pattern that taught us.

Categories
Philosophy

The Distance We Keep: Desire, Fear and the Persistence of Self

Desire and fear appear to pull us in opposite directions, but both persist through the distance they seek to overcome.

Categories
politics

The Wizard Needs the Curtain: Trump, Media and the Machinery of Power

Trump depends upon the opposing media he seeks to exclude. Its opposition generates the conflict through which his political identity acquires force. The wizard needs the curtain, but he also needs someone on the other side insisting that we look behind it.

Categories
Philosophy

The Mind Is Civilisation: Psychotherapy, AI and Infinity

We are not outside the world we are trying to understand. We are (all) implicated in its disorders, participants in its reproduction, and responsible for what happens next.

Categories
cybernetics

The Dice Do Not Need Loading: How Technology Steers What We Believe

Communication systems can make an interpretation familiar before it has been examined, significant before it has been understood, and consequential before anyone establishes whether it is true.

Categories
Philosophy

Institutional Self-Preservation: The Concealment and Reproduction of Failure

An institution’s measure is not how successfully it preserves itself or claims success, but whether it continues to serve its human purpose.

Categories
Philosophy

How to Use AI Better: Breaking the Cycle of Bigger Models

The AI business model converts new capabilities into dependencies, then turns the resulting risks, maintenance burdens and failures into reasons for further investment.

Categories
Philosophy

Geopolitics and the Fragility of Civilisation: When Security Becomes Insecurity

We have become exceptionally capable of reproducing (our, collective) insecurity in the name of security.

Categories
environment humanity life

When the Wind Blows: Climate, Catastrophe and the Brief Candle

The climate is not obliged to change at a pace convenient to those living within it.